1. Field
Certain aspects of the present disclosure generally relate to a wireless communication and, more particularly, to quantizing a received pulse signal with a high resolution by employing one-bit quantizer.
2. Background
Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communications are radio communications that use a frequency bandwidth larger than 500 MHz. In comparison to narrow-band communications which rely on modulation of a carrier frequency, the large bandwidth of UWB communications allows sending signals with features well-localized in time. If a signal is more localized in time, then it is more spread in frequency. This allows communications based on pulses, while information can be encoded in a distance between pulses (i.e., a Pulse Position Modulation: PPM), in a pulse amplitude (i.e., a Pulse Amplitude Modulation: PAM) or in a pulse width (i.e., Pulse Width Modulation: PWM). One of the key advantages of pulse-based communication is ability to precisely localize time of arrival of the information (i.e., arrival of the pulse).
It is desirable that quantization of an analog received UWB pulse signal is implemented with a low cost and low power dissipation. In order to achieve these requirements, a number of quantization bits needs to be small. However, the small number of quantization bits can introduce distortion in the digitized UWB pulse signal, which negatively affects the reconstruction accuracy.
A method is proposed in the present disclosure to quantize the periodic pulse signal at the UWB receiver by using a limited number of quantization bits, while information of the received pulse signal is preserved for accurate signal reconstruction.